Best War Movie

Kubrick' PATHS OF GLORY is right up there, along with DR. STRANGELOVE.

Full Metal Jacket. Apocalypse Now was a film version of Heart of Darkness. Good film, but for the true taste of what it feels like to go to basic training and then be tossed into a senseless war, I've always preferred Full Metal Jacket.

Agree with Full Metal Jacket.

I'll add Bridge on the River Kwai for golden age flavor.

Come and See (1985) Idi i smotri (original title)

I second Paths of Glory

Also, All Quiet on the Western Front, Red Badge of Courage

Platoon.

Full Metal Jacket. The book it is based on, The Short-Timers, is even better.

The drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket was too much of a caricature for me.

All Quiet On The Western Front

Biloxi Blues

The drill sergeant in FMJ was an actual drill sergeant. He was brought in to consult the actor who was originally cast to play the sergeant, but then replaced him when Kubrick realized he was the real deal and better than the actor. My step father served in Vietnam and he said he had a drill sergeant EXACTLY like him.

When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a minute ago was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do.

R11 I prefer Christopher Walken, the drill sergeant in Biloxi Blues.

Watership Down.

In Harm's Way

The Big Parade

All Quiet on the Western Front

Wooden Crosses

The Dawn Patrol

A Walk in the Sun

Battleground

Decision Before Dawn

The Bridge on the River Kwai

The Longest Day

Patton

Platoon

Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

I guess that officially it was a mini-series, but Das Boot is right up there.

Saving Private Ryan deserves a mention because of the first 30 minutes, especially the scenes where they're coming ashore in the landing craft and then shuffling through that mountain of dog tags in front of the wounded soldiers.

Full Metal Jacket loses its fizz once they get to Vietnam.

Empire of the Sun

Paths of Glory is a superb film.

Agree that Das Boot was superlative.

So, Op, see there are plenty of great war films.

Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. They're supposed to be pretty accurate depictions, too.

Stalag 17

Girls you are all craaaazy! It is The Thin Red Line, by Terrence Malick!

Gyllenhaal in Jarhead

Colin Farrell in Tigerland

The Green Berets

Gone with the Wind

Deer Hunter

Another vote for:

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Stalag 17

Merry Xmas, Mr. Lawrence

Empire of the Sun

Also:

Amen (2002, directed by Costa-Gavras)

La Grande Illusion

Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, directed by Wertmueller)

WAR OF THE WORLDS

THE WAR OF THE ROSES

Reach for the sky

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Sergeant York (Gary Cooper)

Midway

Patton

I forgot -- another vote for The Deer Hunter

The Bridge on the River Kwai

Fort Apache

Yanks - the only film that Richard Gere was good in.

R18--nice

r26 if they ever get an outside editor on that, you might be right.

For a war movie as a metaphor, Apocalypse Now, hands down. For actual experience, Full Metal Jacket or Hamburger Hill

Wings is the best war movie. As a sign of its importance, it was given a Best Picture Oscar before any other war movie.

R4 is correct.

Devastating.

One of the greatest films, war/anti-war/otherwise, I've ever seen.

Wings (1927)

Stalag 17 (1953)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

MASH Goodbye Farewell and Amen

SHAME by Ingmar Bergman, probably very accurate as to war on civilians who have retreated to escape war.

The Dirty Dozen

Another vote for "Bridge on the River Kwai." Absolute brilliance. Second is "All Quiet on the Western Front." I'm reading it now.

Zulu

Men and their wars.

Sometimes, I think men raise flags when they can't get anything else up.

Armistice Day bump

Schindler's List

Love this

Apocalypse Now was 2 hrs., 33 minutes. Would have been better edited down to 2 hrs. max.

I was in the USMC and I assure you that Gunny Hartman (Full Metal Jacket) is no caricature. Marine DIs tend to be larger than life. A lot of my favorites have been mentioned--Saving Private Ryan, for the climactic battle in the village as much as the legendary Omaha Beach Sequence. I would also add Platoon, despite Oliver Stone's inability to keep his ham handed politics and clunky symbolism out of it (Spielberg is guilty of this too).

Lesser known films like Hamburger Hill, 1967's Beach Red, and Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (the director's cut) are very good.

The Russian classic Ballad of a soldier and the animated short Tale of Tales.

Jarhead is a great depiction of the modern USMC, and The Messenger for the stateside Army perspective. It's hard to find decent and realistic modern films as so few members of the entertainment business have a military background, which is why older films often ring truer. The Aldo Ray Robert Ryan vehicle, Men in War is a case in point (both Ryan and Ray served in WW2).

The David Carradine independent Americana is an interesting perspective on what it was like to be a returning soldier from Vietnam without explicitly referirng to the war (unlike the hammy Coming Home), and even,I, a weird way, Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, and you can't explore this category without mentioning The Best Years of Our Lives or Till the End of Time, now largely forgotten but with stellar performances from,Robert Mitchum and Guy Madison with homoerotic undertones.

For the best depiction of war from a civilian perspective, it's hard to top The Pianist by that old perv Polanski. He may be fucked up but he's still a genius.

I liked "Brotherhood of War" (Taegukgi) even though it was a little over the top. I cry at the end every time.

What everybody else said, plus:

Downfall

Lawrence of Arabia

R55 -- Was Lt. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) in Apocalypse Now a realistic character, in your opinion? TIA.

The Great Escape? The Thin Red Line?

Platoon?

I'm sure there were incidents like those depicted in Apocalypse now, R59, though that war was before my time. My dad was in Vietnam, but he was in the Air Force so his perceptive would bw different, and watching Vietnam movies with him entails a running commentary of all the factual discrepancies, such as that Harrison Ford was way too young to be a colonel, or they had the wrong magazines for their M16s and weren't holding them right etc.

Generally speaking, Vietnam was a war in which units were isolated away from their commands for long periods, so you might well see unorthodox behavior like the surfing scene, and OTT characters like Col. Kilgore definitely have their real life counterparts like Patton and MacArthur. In the more modern, PC, corporate military, there's a lot less of this. Guys like Norman Schwarzkopf and Gen. Mattis are the exceptions, careful politicians like Adm. Richardson are the rule.

As for scenes

Breaker Morant, which is also my favorite courtroom movie. It's about Australians serving in the Boer War. The court martial is about retribution/ murder during wartime and generals sacrificing soldiers for political reasons. Very well made.

Empire of the Sun is my favorite for the civilian experience of war. It also has my favorite performance by a child actor.

I haven't steeled myself to watch Come and See. It sounds gutting.

r19 Not quite, of course there is the mini-series, but the movie is much more important, the mini-series is rarely shown and mentioned here in Germany, it is always associated with the movie here, which started the careers of many German actors, Wolfgang Petersen, pop singer Herbert Grönemeyer et al. The mini-series contains the movie, I guess, it is not a different filming.

Not a movie, but I found good 'North and South' with Patrick Swayze and so many others. John Jakes was a huge history buff, and he knew a lot about the Civil War, and I guess he had a lot of help, Gone with Wind, r30 true, for the new generation. Lots of academia in it, and more educated and moral than movies, great performances and great chemistry, many Golden Age legends in it; big scenarios. Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson knows a lot about the war and military, lots of war, tactics, missions and battles in it, Lord of the Rings was also influenced strongly by World War I, the first modern war. Big knowledge of World War I not only by Tolkien but also by Jackson. King Kong was also a bit military, military expedition and battles. Adventures of Young Indiana Jones Part 2 all takes place during World War I. Star Wars and to some Braveheart. The writers from Magnum had a lot of knowledge about war and understood its effects, and its effects on modern people and world, I guess; Higgins was a perfect foil for their knowledge and intelligence, great acting and synchro.

For warfare, for me it's a tie between Zulu and the TV show "Combat!"

For drama, I'll take Von Ryan's Express.

For alien warfare, it's a tie between the original War of the Worlds and Aliens.

Thanks, R62 . Glad your Dad survived Vietnam and you can spend time with him.

If we are talking TV, the GOT battle scene with Jon against Ramsay

The Longest Day and Battle of the Bulge. My dad fought the Battle of the Bulge and was awarded the French Legion of Honor medal before he died a few years ago.

I also thought Gallipoli quite good.

Come and See

Not a movie of course, but 'Lost'. The series contained so much knowledge, history, wisdom and science, also in military, strategy, espionage, endeavors, expeditions, colonialism, neo-colonialism, warfare et al. It was also pretty elitist, and the upper classes in societies often have been warrior castes; it also tells a bit the history of Scientology and New Tech, which are both pretty elitist, and the writers and producers were mostly members of the tribe, who know a lot about military, strategy et al, and there has been a connection between military and Großkapital for quite a while.

The one villain was also a great military and strategic mind, who knew a lot about military strategy, espionage, psychological warfare et al, and he worked as a history teacher in the alternate reality, which is a subject that deals with war and military much; he also is a bit the story of Bill Gates, and e.g. Paul Allen from Windows was a huge military buff. The series was 18+ in several countries because of the scenes in Iraq. Several of the actors had a privileged background and dynasty, e.g. Matthew Fox and Clancy Brown, Fox is also a great-great-great-grandson of General Meade of Civil War; many actors have a privileged background and dynasty, but still. William Mapother is in it as well. Borders and frontiers are a topic in it as well, and wars are more likely to happen at frontiers.

There's so many to pick from:

Seven Beauties

Dunkirk

All Quiet on the Western Front

Downfall

Paisan

Apocalypse Now (the original cut, not the longer version)

The Big Parade

Night of the Shooting Stars

Letters from Iwo Jima

Full Metal Jacket

Earth v. the Flying Saucers

A Bridge Too Far

Best anti-war film: the original The Day the Earth Stood Still

A Midnight Clear - a quiet and compelling film.

Saving Private Ryan

[R70]

"Lost" was a mile high pile of horse crap pretending not to be Evangelical propaganda.

Take "Lost" and shove it. Shove it hard. Shove it deep.